Melissa Phruksachart (prook-sa-shart) // Email: mphr [at] umich [dot] edu // Assistant Professor, Dept. of Film, Television, and Media Studies, Univ. of Michigan
This co-authored article shares the result of a digital humanities analysis of the Journal of Cin... more This co-authored article shares the result of a digital humanities analysis of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies' (JCMS) last twenty years of publication regarding possible historic inequities. The project was a collaborative effort of two external researchers, the editorial team, and nine caucus volunteers.
Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965–1996, 2021
Lisa Lowe’s 1991 essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differ... more Lisa Lowe’s 1991 essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” published in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, argued for the profound generativity of the concept of difference in cultural politics. By instead characterizing Asian American racial formation and its cultures through the terms heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity, Lowe challenged the orientalist binaries that had for so long constricted considerations of Asian American culture. Because difference could generate affiliation and expansion, rather than unity, closure, and finitude, it would become a new starting point for apprehending minority cultures outside of the dominant frameworks of national inclusion and normative citizenship. This essay uses the frameworks of “recovery,” “reckoning,” and “remediation” to structure a discussion of the impact of Lisa Lowe’s work, and particularly the insights offered by her 1991 “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity” essay, on the field of Asian American studies.
If what characterizes Asian American radical politics in 2020 is an articulation of the differenc... more If what characterizes Asian American radical politics in 2020 is an articulation of the difference between, and interrelatedness of, the Asian diasporic elite and the migrant poor, the 2018 Asian American films Crazy Rich Asians and Searching achieved mainstream success by celebrating the emergence of the former. The media paratexts of Crazy Rich Asians used race-consciousness as putative resistance, engendering “messianic visibility”—an over-investment in cinematic identification as possessing transformative, even curative, political and personal potential for liberal cisheteronormativity. Meanwhile, Searching's marketing as a film "not about race" was a significant talking point in the U.S. press. Its colormuteness functioned to normalize the entanglement of Asian diasporic elites in the ranks of Silicon Valley's digital empire. The films’ lack of friction in relation to surveillance capitalism and neoliberal empire ultimately highlights the contradictions of race and/as resistance in the present moment.
Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2017
This article studies the production decisions around Mickey Rooney’s yellowface performance of Mr... more This article studies the production decisions around Mickey Rooney’s yellowface performance of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (dir. Blake Edwards, US, 1961), as well as theorizes how his presence cannot be excised from the film. Rooney's yellowface is actually critical to leveraging the film's protagonist, Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), into a desirable model of white femininity.
This essay explores how the televisual genre of the domestic melodrama imagined the introduction ... more This essay explores how the televisual genre of the domestic melodrama imagined the introduction of Asian Americans into white suburban televisual communities during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, I look to episodes of The Donna Reed Show and My Three Sons to examine how Asian American-centered plotlines were manifest as both a crisis and celebration of domesticity, in contradistinction to prior media portrayals of “the Asian” as an emasculated man isolated in pathological bachelor societies. My analysis probes us to think about 1) what it means to desire race-based “realism” in popular culture, and 2) the consequences of associating such claims to realism with liberal narratives of progress, futurity, and justice.
In this article, the author writes to reflect on her experiences as an Asian/American female grad... more In this article, the author writes to reflect on her experiences as an Asian/American female graduate student and co-organizer of the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color (MFFC) project, a social and intellectual formation that emerged out of discussions between women and queer of color students, faculty, and their allies. She briefly reviews some different ways of thinking about graduate student mentorship before explaining the context for the genesis of MFFC, its major initiatives, the problems it faced, and how it resolved those problems. She examines the group's institutional legibility against higher educational rubrics of "diversity" and "professionalization," and she distinguishes between the particulars of the institution and the broader lessons that can be extrapolated. In closing, she considers the danger and value of proliferating fantasies of the good academic life for minoritized subjects.
Mainstream US liberal media coverage of the Women’s March produced a narrative that reinforced th... more Mainstream US liberal media coverage of the Women’s March produced a narrative that reinforced the legitimacy of technocratic and white-centered leadership, despite the racial and ideological diversity of the organizers. // This essay compares coverage of the Women’s March on Washington by the New York Times and Vogue magazine to examine the narrativization around a crisis of leadership among contemporary women’s movements. I begin by briefly tracing how critiques of white feminism jumped from Twitter to Facebook during the rise of the liberal feminist political affinity group Pantsuit Nation. I then review the Times’ and Vogue’s coverage of dissent within the Women’s March, the elevation of the multiracial organizers as a solution to this dissent, and the circulation of the march’s platform of principles as a stand-in for the work of political education. In drawing attention to the particular affective investments circulating within these reports, I signal the limits of liberal media institutions’ ability to report on the fissures within liberalism itself.
Review essay of summer 2020's best-selling antiracist literature. I ask: how will the left’s hist... more Review essay of summer 2020's best-selling antiracist literature. I ask: how will the left’s historical negation of minority thought be accounted for in a moment when the work of Black feminist abolition is driving the nation’s largest uprisings in fifty years?
This co-authored article shares the result of a digital humanities analysis of the Journal of Cin... more This co-authored article shares the result of a digital humanities analysis of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies' (JCMS) last twenty years of publication regarding possible historic inequities. The project was a collaborative effort of two external researchers, the editorial team, and nine caucus volunteers.
Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965–1996, 2021
Lisa Lowe’s 1991 essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differ... more Lisa Lowe’s 1991 essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” published in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, argued for the profound generativity of the concept of difference in cultural politics. By instead characterizing Asian American racial formation and its cultures through the terms heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity, Lowe challenged the orientalist binaries that had for so long constricted considerations of Asian American culture. Because difference could generate affiliation and expansion, rather than unity, closure, and finitude, it would become a new starting point for apprehending minority cultures outside of the dominant frameworks of national inclusion and normative citizenship. This essay uses the frameworks of “recovery,” “reckoning,” and “remediation” to structure a discussion of the impact of Lisa Lowe’s work, and particularly the insights offered by her 1991 “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity” essay, on the field of Asian American studies.
If what characterizes Asian American radical politics in 2020 is an articulation of the differenc... more If what characterizes Asian American radical politics in 2020 is an articulation of the difference between, and interrelatedness of, the Asian diasporic elite and the migrant poor, the 2018 Asian American films Crazy Rich Asians and Searching achieved mainstream success by celebrating the emergence of the former. The media paratexts of Crazy Rich Asians used race-consciousness as putative resistance, engendering “messianic visibility”—an over-investment in cinematic identification as possessing transformative, even curative, political and personal potential for liberal cisheteronormativity. Meanwhile, Searching's marketing as a film "not about race" was a significant talking point in the U.S. press. Its colormuteness functioned to normalize the entanglement of Asian diasporic elites in the ranks of Silicon Valley's digital empire. The films’ lack of friction in relation to surveillance capitalism and neoliberal empire ultimately highlights the contradictions of race and/as resistance in the present moment.
Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2017
This article studies the production decisions around Mickey Rooney’s yellowface performance of Mr... more This article studies the production decisions around Mickey Rooney’s yellowface performance of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (dir. Blake Edwards, US, 1961), as well as theorizes how his presence cannot be excised from the film. Rooney's yellowface is actually critical to leveraging the film's protagonist, Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), into a desirable model of white femininity.
This essay explores how the televisual genre of the domestic melodrama imagined the introduction ... more This essay explores how the televisual genre of the domestic melodrama imagined the introduction of Asian Americans into white suburban televisual communities during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, I look to episodes of The Donna Reed Show and My Three Sons to examine how Asian American-centered plotlines were manifest as both a crisis and celebration of domesticity, in contradistinction to prior media portrayals of “the Asian” as an emasculated man isolated in pathological bachelor societies. My analysis probes us to think about 1) what it means to desire race-based “realism” in popular culture, and 2) the consequences of associating such claims to realism with liberal narratives of progress, futurity, and justice.
In this article, the author writes to reflect on her experiences as an Asian/American female grad... more In this article, the author writes to reflect on her experiences as an Asian/American female graduate student and co-organizer of the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color (MFFC) project, a social and intellectual formation that emerged out of discussions between women and queer of color students, faculty, and their allies. She briefly reviews some different ways of thinking about graduate student mentorship before explaining the context for the genesis of MFFC, its major initiatives, the problems it faced, and how it resolved those problems. She examines the group's institutional legibility against higher educational rubrics of "diversity" and "professionalization," and she distinguishes between the particulars of the institution and the broader lessons that can be extrapolated. In closing, she considers the danger and value of proliferating fantasies of the good academic life for minoritized subjects.
Mainstream US liberal media coverage of the Women’s March produced a narrative that reinforced th... more Mainstream US liberal media coverage of the Women’s March produced a narrative that reinforced the legitimacy of technocratic and white-centered leadership, despite the racial and ideological diversity of the organizers. // This essay compares coverage of the Women’s March on Washington by the New York Times and Vogue magazine to examine the narrativization around a crisis of leadership among contemporary women’s movements. I begin by briefly tracing how critiques of white feminism jumped from Twitter to Facebook during the rise of the liberal feminist political affinity group Pantsuit Nation. I then review the Times’ and Vogue’s coverage of dissent within the Women’s March, the elevation of the multiracial organizers as a solution to this dissent, and the circulation of the march’s platform of principles as a stand-in for the work of political education. In drawing attention to the particular affective investments circulating within these reports, I signal the limits of liberal media institutions’ ability to report on the fissures within liberalism itself.
Review essay of summer 2020's best-selling antiracist literature. I ask: how will the left’s hist... more Review essay of summer 2020's best-selling antiracist literature. I ask: how will the left’s historical negation of minority thought be accounted for in a moment when the work of Black feminist abolition is driving the nation’s largest uprisings in fifty years?
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